The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible eBook

III.

It is a wrong use of the Bible to accept everything
recorded therein as necessarily true.

If the historians were simply the amanuenses of the
Infinite Spirit, then of course they could not have
erred in anything they recorded. If they were
ordinary writers, trying to tell the story of their
peoples’ growth; searching court archives, state
annals, old parchments of forgotten writers, consulting
the traditions of town and village, using their material
in the best way their abilities enabled them to do;
using all to teach virtue and religion, for which
alone they were specially qualified of God; then all
questions of historical accuracy are beside the mark.
Nothing in their inspiration guarantees their historical
accuracy; their philological learning in using ancient
poetic language, or their critical judgment in detecting
exaggerations. Are we to wait anxiously upon the
latest Assyrian tablets or the freshest Egyptian mummy
to confirm our faith that God has spoken to the spirit
of man? Are we to quake in our shoes when a few
ciphers are cut off from the roll of Israel’s
impossible armies? If much that we read as literal
history turns out legend and myth, are we to find
a painful alternative between a blind credulity and
as blind a skepticism? We follow this same re-reading
of Roman and Grecian story untroubled, and see the
heroes of our childhood turn into races and sun-myths
without calling the Muse of History a fraud.

Has it been such comfort to us to read the doings
of Samson as actual history, slaying a thousand men
with the jawbone of an ass, tying fire-brands to the
tails of three hundred foxes, etc., that we should
resent the translation of this impossible hero into
the Semitic Hercules, a solar myth? Or if, perchance,
the historian accepted from remote antiquity the accounts
of great deeds and striking events, as they were told
at the camp fires of the Hebrew nomads, or in the merry
makings of the Palestinian villages, with an ever
growing nimbus of the marvelous gathering around them;
and if thus impossible marvels are reported to us
soberly, are we to be compelled to accept them uncritically
or reject the Bible altogether? The Bible itself
points us to the interpretation of such legends We
have some histories written by the actors in the scenes
narrated. Nehemiah and Ezra, leaders in the most
important movement of Hebrew history after the migration
led by Moses, left accounts of their work from their
own pens. In such a crucial epoch as that of the
restoration of the Jews to their native land, after
the dispersion in Babylonia, we might expect to find
miraculous interpositions on behalf of the chosen
people, if they are to be found anywhere. But
no tale of miracle adorns their simple pages.
No other old Testament history, written by the actors
in its scenes, tells of miracles. Such stories
are found in the traditions written down long after
the events narrated, by men who knew nothing of the
facts at first hand. Exceptions to this rule occur
alone in such startling events as the mysterious calamity
that befell Sennacherib; which strongly impressed
the imagination of the people and naturally gave rise
to exaggerations that we can no longer resolve.